Know What Threatens Your Mental Wellbeing

Is something threatening to compromise your mental health? Identify and learn ways to deal with factors that threaten your mental wellbeing and put you at risk of emotional upheaval.

Is something threatening to compromise your mental health? Identify and learn ways to deal with factors that threaten your mental wellbeing and put you at risk of emotional upheaval.

Good mental health is very important in order to lead a quality life. Your relationships, physical health, personal and professional success; all depend largely upon your good mental health. It is therefore, very important that one identifies factors that add to the risk of shaking that mental balance and learn ways of dealing with them before they take charge and run havoc in your life.

Among the many factors that affect mental well being, genetic and biological factors play a very vital role. However, more important than these two are your experiences in life. The way you think and deal with stressful situations comes largely from your past experiences in life. These shape your mental make-up. Your childhood forms the basis of these experiences, making your upbringing a significant factor when it comes to your mental health.

Mental Health Trivia:

As per World Health Organization (WHO) stats, 25 percent people world over develop one or the other kind of mental disorder.

World over 450 million people suffer from mental ill-health; both from developed as well as under developed nations.

154 million people suffer from depression; 5 million suffer from schizophrenia, 91 million from alcohol abuse and 15 million from drug use.

Almost 66 percent people suffering from mental disorders avoid taking professional help.

Mental disorders will soon become the leading cause of disability world over.

A human suicide occurs every 30 seconds on earth; that amounts to 3000 suicides per day.

90 percent suicides have underlying mental illness as the root cause.

Your mental health could be threatened by the following factors based on your experiences in life:

Facing tragedy early in life: traumatic experiences in childhood, like death of a parent or separation from one due to divorce; experiencing war, accident, abduction or hospitalization in the early years can make you vulnerable emotionally.

Decreased love and affection for and from one’s parents or caregiver: the feeling of not being loved by one’s primary care giver can scar an individual’s psyche for life. It creates feelings of loneliness, confusion, scare and isolation.

Acquired helplessness: due to prolonged exposure to problems and negative experiences a person acquires the feeling of helplessness. He or she feels that they have no control over the unhappiness and despair in their lives and nothing ever goes as desired. This mental state worsens with every negative experience of life.

Prolonged illness: any kind of illness that becomes chronic, either from childhood or acquired during adulthood, generates a feeling of frustration, especially if it alienates you from friends and family or disables your movements and normal functioning; making you dependant on others. This is commonly seen in elderly or handicapped people and also in those who have been on some medication for long and have altered mental states as a side effect of the same.

Abuse: any kind of abuse- physical, emotional or substance abuse can badly affect the mental health of an individual.

Broken relationships: a string of broken relationships can be quite a dent in one’s self esteem and faith in love. Depression is a common outcome.

Professional failures: failures on the professional front become all the more difficult to handle when one finds one’s contemporaries climbing the ladder of success. Dealing normally with people on the social front becomes a stressful task leading to people often avoiding the same.

It is very important for a person or those close to him to identify the distress signals and take remedial action at the earliest. Be alarmed if any of the following signals are noticed and do not go away even after deliberate efforts from your end:

Poor sleep

Feeling of depression, helplessness and loneliness.

Negative thoughts on suicide, running away from home or self destruction.

Over eating, smoking, or drinking excessively to cope up with emotional upheaval.

Constant irritability and short temperedness.

All these indicate you need professional help at the earliest. Do not feel ashamed or shy. Improving one’s mental health is not a difficult task, if one sets one’s mind to it. With support from family and friends, improvement in lifestyle and professional help it is possible to manage one’s emotions and one must do so.